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Posts tagged Code
Slowly Getting Handier with Javascript
Oct 30th
Okay, so for people who are javascript heroes, what I'm going to write about is ridiculously lame. But I think it's cool.
Yesterday, I was working on an application for a client. Part of it needed to use the fancy lightbox feature for images. But on top of this, the client wanted to be able to not only place captions on the lightbox images, but also make elements of the caption linkable.
This is not hard, but for those not used to writing HTML, much less nested HTML, this can be a challenge–definitely not user-friendly from a client's perspective. The easy solution was to provide a "template" that the user could copy, paste and alter as needed. Unfortunately, this is not a very good solution as slight mistakes can cause terrible problems which are not easily resolved by those who don't know how to fix it, much less what the problem actually is.
So I set out for another solution. I've always admired WYSIWYG editors in that they allow users to easily add complex bits of code (like <a> tags with multiple attributes) through a form, which itself inserts the complied code into another form. Always intimidated by javascript, I thought this More >
Application Framework Infidelity
Oct 7th
On the whole, I tend to be fairly loyal in media technologies. I do what I can to support Adobe –I use ColdFusion, the Adobe Creative Suite , and I have even blogged several posts about Adobe's cool javascript framework, Spry . However, sometimes loyalty doesn't cut it. Every once and a while one will run across a problem that requires a certain solution, and said solution cannot be had in such a way that loyalty can be maintained.
Such happened to me recently. I have been developing an application at work that will be using a drag-and-drop feature. Being the loyal Adobe fan that I am, I went immediately to Adobe's Spry framework to search out an answer. Unfortunately, Spry does not currently include drag-and-drop functionality. As an aside, this is not something accidental. I found a thread from a few months back (Spry 1.5 era) in which this functionality was requested. The powers-that-be responded that they did not see enough use cases in which this kind of functionality would be needed. Although the thread participants presented a good number of suggested use-cases, Spry 1.6 is conspicuously missing this functionality.
So…what do you do when your go-to framework doesn't have what you need? You cheat More >
